Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied reports on Monday that he had discussed classified military operation plans with Trump administration officials through text messages on a Signal group chat that unintentionally included a journalist.
“I’ve heard that was characterized, nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth told reporters after landing in Hawaii.
Hegseth was responding to questions about a report published Monday by The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who alleged that he had been accidentally added to a group chat with several top U.S. officials discussing the renewed campaign of U.S. airstrikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen last week.
When first asked whether the leaked information was classified, Hegseth dismissed the question and said Goldberg doesn’t have credibility.
“You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don’t know, the hoaxes of ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ or the ‘fine people on both sides’ hoax. Or ‘suckers and losers’ hoax,” he said, referring to some of The Atlantic’s reporting on President Donald Trump’s first term.
Hegseth then said the U.S. military operation against the Yemeni terrorist group will reestablish deterrence and “ultimately decimate the Houthis.”
In his report, Goldberg alleged that he was added to the group chat on March 15 by someone he believes to be White House national security adviser Mike Waltz.
Other alleged members in the group chat included “JD Vance,” “TG” (who Goldberg believes was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard), “Scott B” (possibly Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent), “Pete Hegseth,” “John Ratcliffe,” and “MAR” (which Goldberg noted are the initials of Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio).
White House National Security Council (NSC) spokesman Brian Hughes said the group chat “appears to be authentic” and that the NSC is “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
“The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials,” Hughes told The Epoch Times.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said he had no knowledge of the episode.
“I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. It’s, to me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business,” Trump said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the Trump administration maintains its “utmost confidence” in the national security team, including Waltz, despite the alleged incident.
In a Senate floor speech, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the encrypted messaging app Signal is an unsecured app and is not approved for sensitive military operations like those Goldberg allegedly had seen.
“This debacle requires a full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created, and how we can avoid it in the future, if our nation’s military secrets are being held around over unsecured text chains,” he said.
Schumer said that if rank-and-file government employees or military personnel had shared information in this manner, they could face investigations and severe consequences.
Ryan Morgan and Emel Akan contributed to this report.
Regarding national secrets, history has shown that D-Day itself would have not succeeded in 1943 had Ike and the allies not leaked phony information about Paton about to land at Calais that diverted troops away from Normandy. Fake leaks happen all the time to keep the enemy confused. Time for THE PEOPLE to trust, but verify what the leadership does with the results, not political propaganda attacks on each other. Trump and his administration to this day have kept Zeleniskii and Putin in manipulative positions not really knowing his negotiation tactics what on the sufaceice make no sense, or seem mean,,,,,but end up manipulating results beneficial to the siedes of good results not the evil empowerment.
Despite all the purposeful corruption and idiocy from the democrats in charge over the last four years, they and their media are having fun criticizing an error by Waltz (which you can be sure will never re-occur assuming it was an oversight). In any case this error caused zero problems with the mission involved unlike the damage done by jasmine Crockett’s mouth and the resulting firebombing of Tesla dealerships.
How can we have national security when we import foreign enemy country 5th columnists into our educational institutions to train them how to more efficiently disrupt our home grown politics and get the technology to defeat us on the battlefield. It’s bad enough they displace legal American students at these so-called higher institutions of learning like a Pocahontas steal of a college education from a native born American student, but all we end accomplishing are creating smarter more efficient terrorists anti-social American disruptors. Their equal rights to speech and justice stop where their bad intentions and our American noses begin.
Churchill on Islam:
“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the
civilization of ancient Rome .”
Those who import Islamists to America for the education in our scientific advantages removes the shelter we have created in that secreted created knowledge and open our throats to be sliced to the point of head removals. Do it to the University Presidents who home and train them before they do it to us first.
SOME dun gon buggered up on this..